


In the Toy Aisle

by Anonymous



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Dialogue Heavy, Gen, Gender Roles, Mathematics, Physics, Satire, author is a math person not a stats person, references to Erdos's idiosyncratic vocabulary, statistics, the colors of subject areas on Khan Academy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-22 21:50:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13773279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "Are you mad? I would never dress my little epsilon in pink! My infant is going to be a statistician one day.""Hmph. Well. I wouldn't put one square millimeter of blue on my little Maudie. She's already interested in particle physics!""That's just 'cause you made your plushy deuterium smell like your perfume."---In a world gone slightly mad, where the expected future adult behaviour of infants is being dictated based on fairly arbitrary criteria, there are two toy aisles: pink and blue.For physics and statistics respectively.





	In the Toy Aisle

**Author's Note:**

> (n.b. ...the author identifies as more or less agender/nonbinary, and this work mostly aims at the cis-/heteronormative trend of strongly gendering children's items. it's not intended to be critical of trans conceptions/experiences of gender)

"I only said you needed to be open minded, Richard."

"Sure, sure, but Rachel--I've had my heart set on a little mini physicist. I don't get along with other statisticians!"

"Well, you may have to. You have a conference coming up, and we don't know what the kid will be. What if we raise them as a physicist but they decide that they'd rather analyze medical datasets instead? What if our child goes into statistical mechanics, can you accept that?"

"You know that's a controversial field, Rachel. Physics and statistics together--"

"Look, sometimes even I do my own stats, and I am the least statistician-y person. I never picked out a favorite distribution, half the time I calculate variance wrong. I always loved my fundamental particle plushies."

"Ugh, how can you calculate variance wrong?"

"Because I have other things on my mind, like, oh, remembering the value of h-bar or how to transform covariant tensors. Maybe they'll turn out to be a botanist like my aunt."

"A botanist! Although, I suppose I could deal better with plants than with having to consign our beautiful child to predicting disease prevalence."

But they let the conversation go there; it was getting late.

* * *

The next day, Richard visited the toy store in anticipation of his co-worker Nancy's baby shower. She was having twins, and had already determined that they would both be physicists, like her wife.

The toy store being what it was and containing a clothing section, he overheard two parents discussing the color selection.

"Are you mad? I would never dress my little epsilon in pink! My infant is going to be a statistician one day."

"Hmph. Well. I wouldn't put one square millimeter of blue on my little Maudie. She's already interested in particle physics!"

"That's just 'cause you made your plushy deuterium smell like your perfume."

"Well, you're convinced that Sam is going to do stats solely because of your Venn diagram mobile. Which was constructed by your writer friend, of all people."

Richard noted the selection of onesies in various shades of pink, with things like "I <3 G (the universal gravitational constant)" or "i want to be Schrödinger when i grow up", complete with a cat inside an open box. On the other side of the aisle, in blues, there were options like "my parents' little bell curve" (in a very delicate shade) or "GEOmetric distribution" with (ha ha) simple geometric shapes and a bolder blue background.

"Do you know, I can't find anything that's suitable for a future mathematician," someone said to him, "Oh, you don't work here." He turned to see that they were wearing a black shirt with a π pumpkin on it.

"No, but I can imagine." He wouldn't mind having a mathematician kid. That was a good midway point.

But there was still more controversy in the toy aisles. A couple with two epsilons were trying to corral one of them into the blue stats aisle and the other into the predominantly pink physics aisle.

"No, Suzy, look at the _physics_ toys. Stop looking at the cards. Hey, look, here's a plush alpha particle. Why don't you play with that? Do you remember what temperature the corresponding element freezes at?"

"No, Penny, you're going to be a statistician. You can't have the periodic table, and stop trying to play with the Newton's cradles. They aren't for you. Study your set theory here, here's a Venn diagram puzzle demonstrating DeMorgan's laws."

He wasn't in the mood for these controversies, and so he looked at the next aisle. Huh. So there were a few toys that weren't segregated. From there, he selected Nancy's future kids a set of large brightly colored plush tiling shapes and elsewhere in the store a pair of blankets printed with with words for "parents" and "children" in various languages. She wouldn't be extremely pleased, but maybe one day the kids would look back and think about whether they have to be what their parents expect.

* * *

"Rachel," he said that night, "I've been thinking. You know, maybe you're right and we should just let our little epsilon choose its own path. People in the toy store argue so much over what toys their kids can have. And our little one might turn out to be a botanist, but they might also turn out to be a writer or study statistical mechanics. Maybe they'll like studying disease prevalence, or sports. Or maybe they'll be the little physicist I'd love to have."

"But they'll still be ours," she said, resting her hand on his belly where the little one was kicking.

**Author's Note:**

> and, incidentally, ~50% of physicists/statisticians being women would be great, commendable even. On the other hand, save in a few pretty specific and numerically small contexts (e.g. a science conference, a teacher's lounge, a small town that hosts a telescope/neutrino detector etc.) 50% of women being physicists (or statisticians) is just a questionable idea... Look. We don't presently have a need for roughly every fourth person to pursue physics or statistics.
> 
> (An additional note: much of the rest of Erdős's idiosyncratic vocabulary is rather misogynistic, if you chose to look it up. But calling children epsilons is kind of adorable and it does not seem that he treated women particularly badly otherwise. ...people are definitely mixed bags. However, that aspect was not researched in particular, nor was any research done into Schrödinger's personality.)


End file.
